The Terror of Knowing

Welcome one, welcome all, to yet another Tag Thursday! Every Thursday (disclaimer: when I remember), I like to post a fun little tag post to mix things up a bit. This week’s tag is courtesy (once again) of the lovely ladies at Thrice Read and it’s called the Guilty Reader Book Tag. (I’m not sure of the originator of the tag but if you know please do let me know because I’d like to credit them!) Let’s not waste any more time since life if short (and I have a tonne of posts to try to write and schedule before I leave for the US this weekend), let’s dive right on into the tag.

The Questions

1. Have You Ever Regifted A Book That You’ve Been Given?

Nope! Probably because very few people gift me books in the first place – they tend to give me Waterstones vouchers or money to spend on Amazon – so I have very little occasions to then regift to someone else.

2. Have you ever said you’ve read a book when you haven’t?

I may have not entirely read a book I did my undergraduate dissertation on but, in my defence, it was Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and it is bloody long so I read the sections I needed to use for my argument and then skipped over the rest. One day, I will read it cover-to-cover though, I’m determined, and after I’ve finally finished War and Peace no book will ever seem quite as daunting – one day, I will!

3. Have you ever borrowed a book and not returned it?

Accidentally, yes. I borrowed a copy of The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis from a friend at school who now doesn’t live in the area we grew up in, and neither do I for that matter. Next time I see her I will try to give it back but I’m very unlikely to remember it – yikes, I’m a bad book borrower!

4. Have you ever read a series out of order?

Not really, not where it matters. I have read those novelisations of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sabrina the Teenage Witch in a random order but I don’t think they strictly needed to be read in order, right?

5. Have you ever spoiled a book for someone?

Kind of, yes, but I wasn’t spoiling it at the time. What I mean is that I gushed a lot about what was happening as I was reading Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom duology and V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series to Liz who wasn’t planning on reading them but then she has since picked up those books to read. So technically I wasn’t doing anything spoiler-ish at the time!

6. Have you ever doggy eared a book?

Yep, if I’m really into a book, I tend to. See the aforementioned Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom – I loved the shit (pardon my French) out of those books and it shows in the amount of pages I dog-earred. I’m very pro marking your books in this way – I even wrote a blog post about it recently!

7. Have you ever told someone you don’t own a book when you do?

In all likelihood, probably, if I didn’t want to lend them my copy of it because I was worried they wouldn’t take care of it. (Because not everyone treats books carefully, do they?) But I can remember any specific person and/or book title right now so I do wonder if this situation has ever actually occurred!

8. Have you ever told someone you haven’t read a book when you have?

Nope! Why on earth would I do that?

9. Have you ever skipped a chapter or a section of a book?

See answer to question 2. Also, in my second-year Renaissance to Restoration literature class I may or may not have not entirely finished all the sections of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene or Milton’s Paradise Lost – I read enough to get the general gist, I assure you! I’m still kind of ashamed of The Faerie Queene thing though, seeing as how early modern literature became my specialism.

10. Have you ever bad mouthed a book you actually liked?

Not in earnest, no. But everyone loves to trash talk the likes of Twilight, right? And I actually quite liked the first book when I read it! (Not sure if I’d say the same now but still…) I will also gladly bad mouth the quality of some books I’ve read because they deserve to be mocked, i.e. Anna and the French Kiss, but I always will still admit if I bloody loved it despite all its (many) problems.

There we have it, folks, that was the Guilty Reader Book Tag. I hereby tag… you! If you’re reading this, tag, you’re it! If you do respond to my childish tagging and do the tag yourself, please do link me to your blog post because I’d love to take a peek.

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